e had just
travelled. This was, indeed, provoking. But we were soldiers, and had
learned that our first and principal duty was prompt and unquestioning
obedience to orders. So we bade good-bye to the other regiments of our
brigade by giving three hearty cheers for each as they marched past us
on their long journey to the West, and immediately turned our faces
southward again and started for Somerset.

It then being nearly sunset, we bivouacked for the night as soon as we
came to a convenient place, and resumed our backward march at daylight
the next morning. The First Tennessee Battery and a regiment of mounted
infantry soon joined us, and in company with them we reached Somerset,
having gone by the way of Camp Dick Robinson and Hall's Gap, after a
four days' march. In six successive days we had marched one hundred
miles. And what was somewhat remarkable, we went into camp at the end of
this time with not a man left behind.

After a stay of ten days at Somerset, during which time our base of
supplies was at Stanford, thirty-three miles away, and could only be
reached by our mule teams, we moved down to the Cumberland river, where
we encamped on a high and precipitous bluff overlooking the river and
the rugged mountainous scenery for a long distance. A brief rest and on,
on we went again, bivouacking for a night on the battle-field of Mill
Springs, where General Zollicoffer met his fate; climbing the mountains
with our heavily laden mule teams, building bridges, constructing roads,
and making but slow progress over the roughest country that I ever saw.
Several of my teams were capsized and rolled down a steep embankment,
mules, drivers and all; others got mired in swamps, and it was with the
greatest difficulty that they were ever extricated; but we pulled
ourselves along in one way and another over a distance of thirty miles
of this sort of country, and finally reached Jamestown (popularly known
as "Jimtown"), on the southern border of Kentucky, on the twenty-third
day of June, which place proved to be the end of our journey southward.

The Thirty-second Kentucky infantry, called the "thirty two-sters,"
Colonel Wolford's famous cavalry regiment, six hundred strong,--the most
dare-devil set of fellows, probably, in the Union service,--together
with two mounted regiments of infantry, here reported to Colonel Browne
and were temporarily placed under his command, and everything made ready
for a brush with the rebels, whic